Apple sold an estimated 180K Vision Pro units during the first pre-order weekend | Hacker News Reader

Apple sold an estimated 180K Vision Pro units during the first pre-order weekend

medium.com

79 pointstotaldude87115 comments

I'll gladly leave this 180K people (how many of those are scalpers? see https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=apple+vision+... ) review it and figure out any possible issue/defect/anomaly/whatever for me.

I would love to own one, but for what I've seen and read looks like there's a lot to work on: battery (a merely 2 hours, a movie can be easily longer than that), 3rd parties support, etc...

I wonder if a company like Anker will be able to release anything sooner rather than later to help extend device use on battery.

Probably yes. But if you want me to shell more than 3K dollars you can't give me the battery life of a Meta Quest 3, way cheaper.

Presumably you can just run it plugged in/charging, right?

Have you ever tried that with an Apple "magic mouse" ?

Yes you can. The battery pack has a usb-c port for charging while in use

So basically, for extended use, you need a battery pack for your battery pack. I’m going to look pretty cyberpunk when I gear up

Or you can just plug it in to your wall?

That doesn't sound as comfortable, nor as cyberpunk.

Yeah I’ve seen people buy two batteries so you can just cycle them.

For battery, I think it can be connected directly to power instead of always rely on battery. I may need pure-battery when moving around (hopefully nothing more than 2hr) but have it plugged in when I am stable.

I think the plane ride use case is what people target the most, but then again bringing extra powerbanks is feasible

I would imagine that the target demographic flies premium/business and will almost certainly have power sockets for long flights.

Are there lots of airlines that don’t have power at every seat now?

I was very surprised not to have it in business class on the return trip over the Atlantic around Christmas, so it happens.

Airlines in Europe often don't have it on short-haul flights

In a long-haul Turkish Airlines flight I took in October, I only had USB-A power. But it was economy, who knows what the higher tiers had.

Probably anyone flying with a $4000 headset has a seat with a power outlet

The target use case for this is a long-haul drive in the Cybertruck

lol. Upvote. Wait, Idlewords? Should have guessed. We’ve missed you!

I wonder how much charging ones headset would reduce the driving range.

Most planes have power points these days too.

I can't think of a flight I've taken in the last 5 years where my seat didn't have it's own 110V/220V outlet and multiple USB ports.

Always literally the cheapest tickets I could book, always economy class. Domestic US, domestic Canada, 8+ countries international.

Yeah. I feel like any gen 1 product is going to have a lot of issues. So unless you really want to be a super-early adopted and deal with the issues, lack of apps, etc. it's hard to justify a purchase.

I love being an early adopter, but not at $3,500, so I'll be waiting for gen 2 or 3.

I would be surprised if the price dropped. I believe Apple is known for keeping their pricing fairly neutral or increasing it. You could get a Gen 1 second hand, though.

If there's not a sub-$2,000 version of this thing in 18 months, it's going to get put in Apple's attic alongside the Newton and G4 cube.

Essentially no consumer is spending $3,500 on a single tech purchase anymore. That price point is just way too high for anything but niche business use and I just don't see Apple being willing to settle for that niche.

Unless they can deliver a totally game-changing experience imo. And so far it looks like they have the best VR/AR headset on the market, but will that be enough, remains to be seen.

Like if Apple is able to provide such a good experience, that I don't need multiple monitors for work, I could easily justify that purchase. But it would have to have great battery life, support virtual screens, provide a fast and smooth experience, be super comfortable even after 6-7 hours, etc. I don't think Gen 1 will check all those boxes off, but gen 2-3-4, maybe.

> unless .. game-changing

I have been silently dismissive until seeing a c.a. 5 minute ad on YouTube last night. Now I would be interested in at least trying the experience. However, I am wondering if the sales video might be better rendered (or somehow more impressive?) than the VR/AR itself.

Right, unless it replaces another $2000+ device, it's pretty hard to get mass market adoption at a $2000 price point, let alone 2x above that all-in.

The market for $2000 laptops is decent for example, but this thing for productivity use cases still needs you to own the $2000 laptop to connect to!

Cameras have moved higher end as the market has shrunk, but there still aren't that many of us buying $4000 cameras.

Even inflation adjusted, this is about 3x the intro iPhone price. Mass adoption followed when the price got cut 40% and they worked out subsidy & financing with the carriers so optically the price became 80% lower.

There’s at least 180,000

Apple sold 200 million iPhones last year.

If there’s any company capable of raising the overton window of tech pricing it’s apple. The price of AirPods Max seemed like a joke when it came out, but I see them everywhere.

Yeah they did do a great job of taking headphones/earbuds from throwaway freebies to $100-$200 must-haves and then pushing that to $500 with the Max. Although the Max certainly isn't a must have for most people.

I just a hard time believing that $3,500 is the price point they have in mind for VR stuff. In my own head, I had decided to insta-buy if it was $2,000 at launch and I wasn't even close.

Apple introduced it as the "Pro" model which is the high end line in apple-parlance. I'd expect a future non-pro model to slot in under it with all the essential features.

I also wouldn't be surprised if the Vision Pro eventually retails for $2999 instead of $3499. Today, it's a relatively low volume product and I'd expect costs to fall when Apple makes a push for a larger market

Early buyers of the original iPhone got money back like six months later when the price was cut. I believe around $200

> I would be surprised if the price dropped.

I wouldn’t, especially under Tim Cook.

> I believe Apple is known for keeping their pricing fairly neutral or increasing it.

For the flagship product, sure. But older generations get discounted. The iPhone 15 is out, yet they continue to sell 14 and 13.

It also depends on if they will refresh it every year. The AirPods Max came out a while ago and the price still hasn’t dropped.

Never buy a gen 1 apple product unless it's for work.

Speaking as a first-gen iPad and Apple Watch buyer. It goes obsolete so quickly.

I got a few years use out of my first-gen iPad and Apple Watch - bought the iPad on release day, the Watch several months in.

That felt pretty reasonable given the cost for each.

I don't disagree with your sentiment for the Vision Pro, but can't agree for the iPad or Watch.

our first gen iPad is still around, with older apps you can't get any more. it still plays new itunes movies or shows that i can buy today.

my first gen watch is used by one of my kids, paired with his iPhone. it works fine for him, tells the time and everything.

perhaps some people don’t see the value in getting a lot of use out of the devices, but that certainly doesn't mean it isn't possible!

I confirm that experience. The first iPad in particular only got a couple years of updates. https://iosref.com/ipados

I don't really regret those purchases, but that's me. I was an early adopter, not a regular customer by any stretch.

Never say never... I got the first generation iPad, and was happy that I did. But then, it was not that expensive. But yes, especially with such a new product category, you really want to wait a few generations, if you want to get the best product for your money. Just look how quickly iPhones evolved and this Vision Pro is even more groundbreaking.

It was quickly followed by an iPad that was much thinner, nearly 2x faster, a bit lighter, and supported for 4 more iOS versions.

As I said, I was happy. In the end it is always the relation on how you balance quickly vs. spending money on a first-gen product. But yes, most iPad customers probably were happier with the 2nd gen.

First Gen iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac Mini, iMac (all form factors) they were all amazing and had very few problems.

Is there not a way to plug it in while watching a movie?

From what I have read, you can recharge the battery while in use, so that sounds like you wouldn't be limited to 2 hours of use as long you can plug in.

This is really a release mostly for developers and enthusiasts who are willing to spend some money on a product which still has to grow. From the software obviously and one can also expect quite some hardware improvements with the next generations, at least wrt. run time and possibly weight.

Here's the thing though – do people want a $3500 gen 2 or gen 3 Vision Pro with all the kinks sorted out and a few incremental upgrades, or a $500-800 version with vastly inferior specs? I'm going to say neither, because most people I know are waiting for a $500 Vision Pro, but I don't think that is ever going to happen.

Then the product is dead in the water.

I can see a $2000 vision down the line but not as low as $500.

Yeah, $500 seems basically impossible for an "Apple" product. I mean AirPods are $200 minimum. The latest phones are $1000. Their laptops are all $1000+. I'm not sure how Apple would make a product that has a screen and sell it for the price of a couple pairs of ANC bluetooth earbuds.

They sell iPads for $300. Meta Quest 2 is $250. Plenty of other VR headsets are in the $300-$500 range. Sure you can argue about quality and everything else, but for the average consumer $3500 is one zero too many.

How can there be a lot of scalpers when they're an appointment only to fit at the Apple store?

They're not, they'll ship them directly to you.

I’m sure plenty are grassroots scalpers, but I recall seeing some fine print about limitations per household (2 I believe). Which is in line with the old limits they had in other products[0].

How they enforce that is of course another thing. It’s less meaningful if it it’s just based on Apple ID, more if it’s based on payment methods or billing address. Then again, they guide orders through a Face ID scan for fit, so that makes it easier to limit orders.

0: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/23/apple-dropping-de...

Haha wait. How do you scalp a product on pre-order that requires an in-person fitting. Seems such a roundabout way to a headache. It's easier just to let Apple's marketing funnel suck you in ahah

It's a pretty exciting new product line but I think I will sit it out til Gen2. It's clearly pushing the limits of ergonomics because of where the tech is (battery life / goggles weight).

Using it for virtual displays with a physical keyboard/trackpad for productivity use cases on a Mac looks pretty cool. But if its weight restricts how many hours per day I can use it.. I still need to own a bunch of monitors anyway.. so ..

> It's a pretty exciting new product line but I think I will sit it out til Gen2.

For something this expensive, gen 4 is the minimum entry point for me. Even the iPhone and apple watch didn't start getting "great" until gen 4. There are many things to work out with the device and there needs to be a functioning support market to justify the cost... but honestly, until I see a great use case for the headset there's not a lot of interest for me at all. I have a Quest 2 that's been gathering dust for 2.5 years now. There just isn't enough to justify the hassle of using it.

> Using it for virtual displays with a physical keyboard/trackpad for productivity use cases on a Mac looks pretty cool.

I currently have 3 monitors: my 16" MBP, a 24" samsung and a 27"samsung... even the combined prices for these devices do not equal the cost of the headset and I don't have to deal with the "experience" of a headset. Hell, I only approach the cost of the headset when I add in the prices of my mouse, keyboard and desk.

This will sell easily. It's by far the most advanced Vision Pro yet.

Really interested if this can become a laptop replacement while at home. Not sure I would carry it to the local coffee shop, but I’m thinking with a Bluetooth keyboard I might be able to replace my aging MacBook Pro while at home. Considering all the tech it has seems like a cheaper alt than buying another MacBook Pro

It may be a monitor replacement, but isn't intended to compete with your MacBook.

This gen, maybe not, but it will if it survives to future generations

It runs apps on its own. So many things you might want to do on an iPad could run just on the Vision Pro itself. While I can't live without a full computer, a lot of people are happy with an iPad only. Many of those might also be happy just with a Vision Pro.

The coversation is about a MacBook Pro, not an iPad. Users of the two have very different expectations in terms of CPU, memory, storage, battery life and more.

you can get 1TB storage with an M2 chip. if you're ok with being plugged in, then this can be a developer machine.

Depends on what the original poster uses his MB Pro for and how much computer power is required. That is why I compared it to an iPad. A M2 is quite a powerful processor on its own. Any "power" user won't use the VP for computing, I guess, but it could well hold its own against an aging MB Pro, as long as the kind of software used it supported at all.

My M2 Air runs circles around my Intel MB Pro I am using for work. So the VP would certainly be faster, but probably not run the software I need. But then, maybe there will be an Emacs optimized for the VP :)

I dunno. I'm in my 40s and I can't even begin to imagine the neck strain you'd have after strapping goggles to your face for 8 hours a day. Even counter-balanced, it's going to be hard on your neck.

We'll probably see chiropractors giving these things out for free to drum up business...

I'm 40, and have been doing just that for the past six months, while gaming.

You get used to the weight very quickly, and weight in general isn't an issue so much as balance is. Using a rigid attachment and adding more weight to offset in the back helps a lot.

For what it's worth, I'm using a Pimax Crystal QLED. Without going through the trouble of looking it up, I believe it's about 2.5-3x the overall weight of the AVP.

I'm looking forward to using it (or the AVP) for productivity as well. The only thing stopping me at the moment is that my favorite app for that purpose - and by a long shot - is Immersed. It's not available for Pimax. They do plan to support AVP, and I'll likely get one for that purpose alone.

I have been hoping for more informed commentary concerning the scuttlebutt that Apple and Sony had a falling out over the a purported refusal to ramp up micro-OLED production, leading Apple to source future production in the PRC. Supposedly only around 900k OLED units were supplied by Sony (so, 450k AVP units), constraining potential sales for the near future. The general assumption in the press seems to be that sales are largely demand determined, but I suspect the cutting-edge technology used may still be in short supply, hence the high price validated for the relatively few units available.

Is that a lot or a little?

a lot for a Mac a little for an iPhone.

Seems like a lot. It would take 150 days just to run Apple's "making of" video that many times.

$3500 * 180000 = $630m or have I done the maths wrong? I would say that is a LOT even for Apple!

Apple makes $390B per year - which is about ~$1.06B per day.

So, yeah, $630m for one weekend is a lot.

Though, if you look at iPhone sales - Apple sold 13M iPhone 6s in the first week - and in 2 years sold about 200M - meaning about ~6.5% of sales over 2 years.

This would mean the Vision Pro might be on pace to sell about ~$6B per year - which is about ~1.5% of Apple revenue.

This is less than 1/3rd of AirPods - so, for a company the size of Apple - this doesn't really seem that significant right now.

It's obviously hard to predict the future, though...

iPhone and AirPods are mature mass market items with historically juicy margin and volume. I don't think it's appropriate to compare Vision Pro on this basis because AR/VR just isn't there yet in terms of market adoption. Even as it matures, it may never grow to the size of the smartphone market, but right now the upside is undeniable. Playing in that market competitively will require a large ongoing investment for years, perhaps decades, so I'm more inclined to judge Vision Pro on the qualitative feedback. The preorders just represent short-term hype which is 90% Apple brand and marketing, so I'm not reading too much into them either way.

Apple's device sales seem to have largely plateaued though. Id say any new device growth is pretty significant for them.

Thanks for all the context. I really wish journalists would include this sort of thing regularly. Especially in today's world where there isn't a limitation on physical print size.

I'm not remotely sure about your extrapolation there. The 6s came out when everyone already had a smartphone. Likewise AirPods when most people had Bluetooth headphones. Both mass market products.

This is a brand new product line. Nobody knows if they want one yet. Mass-market normies have barely heard of it. Now, if you'd compared it to the OG iPhone...

This is not a brand new product line.

Similar to AirPods - the headset market has been around for a while now.

There's ~12M VR headsets being sold per year already. As far back as 2019 - there were ~5M VR headsets being sold per year.

“Spatial Computing” is a new product category. Apple is not marketing this as a VR headset or gaming device. It certainly is a new product category for Apple in any case.

I’m having flashbacks to iPhone and BlackBerry comparisons. Sure, they were both “smartphones” but once the App Store came out the iPhone was clearly in a different category of device. The form factor isn’t nearly as important to defining what the product category is as what the device is used for and what problems it solves IMO. App Store policies and shenanigans will probably prevent the Vision Pro from overlapping too much with existing VR headsets use cases.

Right now it isn’t clear that many people that like the Quest would buy a Vision Pro even if money wasn’t an issue. The use cases are that different. I think the reverse is true as well, there will be plenty of people that will be interested in the VP and not in VR headsets. If nothing else that points to market segmentation.

12m a year globally, is that all? I think many more smartphones were being sold when the 6s came out

They also sell around 20 million Mac per year. Even though they are great these days and people see value in having laptop/desktop it's still only like 10% of market share.

And in those 20 million Mac a year probably bulks of sales are cheaper Macbook air and Mac mini

It's unlikely to gonna be a big source of apple revenue until they can reduce price to sub $2000 and/or provider bigger value. Would like if they provided usb/Hdmi out so that it could also act as Mac and apple Tv replacement when connected to TV or monitor + MacOS support.

Well the largest seller is Meta, naturally, since theirs are the cheapest and they've supposedly moved 20 million headsets. The second most popular (on Steam anyway which skews in it's favor) is the Valve Index, which has moved 149 thousand units.

I mention that because I have a feeling a venn diagram of the purchasers of both the Vision Pro and Index have a lot of overlap. I don't have data for that beyond the numbers being kind of similar, but:

- VR is a niche technology

- Index and Vision Pro are both quite pricey and unlikely to be someone's first go into the tech, so you're talking true VR enthusiasts. Casual wanna-tryers are going to go for a used Vive or a Meta Quest

That being said I wouldn't die on the hill of this analysis, because while the Index is expensive (full kit is about $1k) there's still a steep increase for Vision Pro, which runs $3,600 if memory serves.

The 20M figure includes Quest 1, 2, and Pro, and spans several years [0].

[0: https://skarredghost.com/2023/03/03/quest-20-million-mainstr...]

I enjoyed my Index and I also pre-ordered the Apple Vision Pro

You can't really run AAA games on the Vision, can you?

You can run AAA games on any apple silicon, and the perf is usually superior to anything else on the market except specialized gaming PCs. The real issue is that there is a small selection compared to xbox/ps/pc.

> You can run AAA games on any apple silicon

This is a pretty big oversimplification. Anyone familiar with VR tech and VR gaming knows that experiences that aren't made and instead are modified after the fact to be VR compatible =/= VR experiences. In that sense, I would say the only truly AAA VR game I know of is Half Life Alyx. And it is incredible mind you, but this is a very, very, very exclusive club for games to be in. MAYBE you could count Skyrim VR as it's by far the most polished VR port I've played, with only some jank here and there. But then you have stuff like Fallout 4 VR which, and I say this as someone who put an unethical amount of time into Fallout 4, Fallout 4 VR is just... trash. Just pure garbage. Utterly unplayable. And then there's Doom 2016 VR, which like... you took a run and gun and had to remove the run part to make it so people wouldn't vomit violently after 5 minutes. Is it even the same game?

But "specialized gaming PC" IS what gamers play on. I have a M2 Max and even for native Apple Silicon games like Stray or BG3 the performance is pretty poor, even compared to discrete GPUs of several years ago.

Don't get me wrong, I love that laptop, but a gaming PC it is not. Apple Silicon has the efficiency but not the raw horsepower, even if you get something like the Ultra. That doesn't even include things like DLSS and Reflex. I do my gaming on GeForce Now because it's a dramatically better experience.

That said, it should still be oodles more powerful than the Quest, at least. I wonder if Apple will actually try to push gaming on it.

I don't really disagree with what you say, but I mostly play on laptops and I find that a MacbookPro M3 max feels about the same as my Razer gaming laptop with a 4090 in it.

It's the same silicon on laptop and desktop with apple gear though, and that isn't true with x86. The desktop chips with an edgy heat profile are nearly twice as fast as the laptops if not more. But compared to xbox or PS the apple machines still win. So it's really specialized gaming desktops that win, even though it is by a solid margin.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think I'd feel the same way about Wintel laptop GPUs. I tried a few in the past but they were so much worse than the desktop GPUs I returned them.

But in any case, I'd still consider gaming laptops specialized gaming hardware. It takes a 40-core M3 Max to approach ~4080 levels, and the Vision only has 10 GPU cores for a roughly 6k display at 90 Hz. That's not going to be a great AAA experience...

Personally I wish they went the opposite way, just a dumb display-only headset without the compute, and streamed everything from a Mac/desktop PC/the cloud.

But, still, it's pretty exciting to see this come out. I won't be able to afford something like this for a few years, but I'm still hoping Apple really makes a dent in this space.

It is estimated that it will be supply constrained all year by the screens for each eye, to about 1 million total units for in 2024. So, selling nearly 20% on the first weekend? Sounds like a lot.

The article mentions Apple has 1.2 billion active users. They need 0.014% of those to buy one to hit that number.

The bigger question, also mentioned in the article, is how many of those preorders are scalpers.

Some that I follow are pre-ordering multiples but intending to return all but one. Some did it to secure a launch day model or specific fit.

I find the scalpers always have such reasonable sounding rationalizations.

It’s only available to US users, so your math is probably a bit off.

So you’re saying more scalpers than I thought?

More seriously I found 150 million active iPhones in the USA, which would make it roughly 0.12%, or we can use 40% of revenue to scale our original guess (since presumably the US contains a large proportion of those 1.2 billion who would purchase a $3500 device) and get to 0.035%.

It's more than they've ever had for a vision pro release.

I would say both. it’s an irrelevant fraction of the market. At the same time, you need some faith to buy into this at the moment. We’ll see in an iteration or two whether it worked out or not.

How big that is also depends on their production run, and I don’t think we’ll have any accurate figure for that for quite some time, if ever.

180k developers is a lot.

180k consumers is barely a market.

I think it's mostly developers, though. I ordered one, to try some immersive data visualization stuff.

I ordered one, to try some immersive data visualization stuff.

Considering what Dall-E and the like are capable of, I suspect that AI will be able to lay out data for us. This includes tasks where multiple web and smartphone apps are opened and data is entered. These could be opened grouped in framed windows, with process lines drawn between them.

Well, the truth is somewhere in between. A decent market for now perhaps depsite the hesitation in buying the first gen product because of its imperfections.

On the flip side, there's a decent market for people with disposable income who just always have to buy the latest and greatest gadget because they read about it online/because it's new and fresh.

Yes, though it's not a great market. Usage tends to be low (they sit in a drawer) so there's not much follow-on app store revenue, and developers don't target your platform.

"Developers! stomp Developers! stomp Developers!" is actually great wisdom.

I'm gonna guess it's mostly rich techies who buy every product Apple releases. Remember there is a market for their $700 Mac Pro wheels (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...).

It's a ton if you were a startup launching your first product from nothing.

Not much for Apple, Meta reports 20 million Quest sales (18M of that Quest 2 sales so you can take an educated guess how much the 1 and Pro made up of the remaining 2M).

From what's going in the device the margins are probably not great on the main unit, especially when you compare it to the plastic Quest 2.

Over half-a-billion in sales for a $3500 dollar v1 product on day one.

Literally only Apple could probably pull that off.

Why does Apple think they'll have success with a VR product when others have recently tried and failed? Especially when the new product is 10x the cost of the failed product. Price was a barrier to the adoption of the cheaper, existing device.

Remember Apple is a fashion company and not a tech company. Their marketing plan and expectations are entirely different than other companies. Their pictures demo isn't coders simulating four monitors, it's coaches on the sidelines getting instant replays and notes from the box. It's movie stars popping it on after a scene to review the various takes. Doctors in the OR getting an endo-feed. The idea is to make something that's trendy and useful, charge a premium then push it to mass market from the top down and let all the non-brand conscience people buy the alternatives that emerge. Many of which will be cheaper and better just like with any other apple tech.

Am I missing something or are people just taking the word of an unknown Medium blogger with no sources as the official truth?

You’ve missed something in this instance because you’re surely not a follower of rumors and news about Apple. Ming-Chi Kuo is not some random blogger but a financial analyst with reliable and deep connections within Apple’s supply chain. He has a great track record of announcing what Apple is up to (hardware wise) and its plans for the future. MacRumors has a dedicated category for news related to or announced by him. [1] AppleInsider also publishes his predictions and analysis. [2]

If there are a few people on this entire planet who can be relied on (mostly, since nobody can be right all the time) to publish trustworthy predictions of Apple’s plans and products, it would be Ming-Chi Kuo, Mark Gurman (Bloomberg) and Ross Young (he specializes on the display side of things).

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ming-chi-kuo/

[2]: https://appleinsider.com/inside/ming-chi-kuo

no one except apple would know the actual numbers and they wont publish it (post steve jobs era thing) the next best bet is on estimates and this guy has a track record.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

That's exactly how I imagine most comments in these Vision Pro threads on HN are going to age.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com